25/03/2020
We’re trying.
Denying this won’t help anyone but a lot of our self worth as men is tied and tethered to how much money we have because we were raised to believe that a man must provide for and protect his family. A man with money is a man’s man. He’s worthy. He’s loved better. He’s respected. He’s treated like a king.
We’re taught to have character but it’s always trumped by that money factor. You see how your family members treat the men without and how they heartily bow in reverence to the monied men in your bloodline. How even your own father will trash men who don’t work without understanding their reasons in preference for one who does. How in agony your broke uncles live from the emotional scorn they bear and the disregard and disrespect they endure from their own siblings for not having.
Money makes for better manhood (A man with money knows more stability than a man without) is what we were told. You don’t get what you can’t keep with the money you don’t make. Money though, is difficult to come by for men because it’s hard to find employment and nothing worthwhile in life, including the love of a woman will stay with you without the money required to build that relationship or marriage.
Fatherhood is stunted by this too. Majorly. A lot of men feel inadequate for not being able to support their children financially and that shame and guilt builds and the immediate response, agree with it or not, in a lot of men is to hide from being reminded of how much they’re failing. It’s not a great response and men know it isn’t but it keeps happening because they’re not encouraged to think, feel and be better by not focussing on their current negative financial situations.
This is how a lot of men start to suppress by using drugs and alcohol to numb themselves and find an escape from that shame. Anything to face the reality that character is overlooked when your bank account isn’t on a level to support what you want.
The brunt and burden men carry is heavy on their souls. The weight of growing up in families without financial, planning, savings and security immediately and automatically falls on men because they continue their names. We go study things we think will carry us forward into prosperity only to sit on student loans and qualifications for years on end as we decay in the rubble of our unrealised dreams. And you’re always reminded of how much of a failure you are for not having.
Stress. Depression. Anxiety. Panic attacks. Negative thinking. Soul crushing environments and families that pile complaints after complaints after complaints on your head because sleeping things off is automatically seen as you being lazy and ungrateful when your friends are out there doing something and bringing home Ratanama and gravy everyday.
Wa zama mara nothing ever ever seems to tlhakana for you and that R60 to go to town to go phanda can literally feed the kids for the next two and a half days. Mxim.
Broke men get left by women who leave for men with a better social and financial standing and they’re broken in the process. Men shut down emotionally and harden up when money is lacking to help them fix things. Our natural instinct is to fix things and money affords us the tenacity to do such things but when you have nothing, hope stops being the food you serve on a plate of a good woman’s love. You stop believing in yourself even.
Men feel worthless when they can’t provide. And a man who can’t provide isn’t regarded man enough by a world that expect from him what he’s been raised to be responsible for. That raising comes with a weight he is struggling to figure out and it’s breaking him down day to day to date.
We toil. We work. We scrape and scrounge and rise in dust and break to build. We cry in silence hiding from you because you think us weak for feeling our feelings and when we show our vulnerability, the worlds in the women we trust buckles in fear that we’re not strong or man enough to protect them how we must.
We’re equated to the men who broke them time and time again. Men who used them to stand up financially and left them for other women. Our lack of money, is a sharp and stinking reminder of a past they’ve endured and don’t want to feel like that again and who can blame them for relying on things they know from a past they can’t change.
We’re dealing with a now we don’t want and it’s breaking us just as much but smile papa, a man must learn to toughen up. In order to stand up.
We can all intellectualise about how black men don’t do what they’re supposed to but please understand that that expectation of us, that lack you’re all quick to point out, it completely tied to how worthless we feel without money.
But who listens to scrubs. Who listens to good, trying black men who remain down on their luck.
We’re trying.
And it hurts.
— h.a-l
